Straight On 'Til Morning

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Storms are a part of every voyage, just as storms are elemental to life itself. They are, oddly enough, a part of everything we do, behind many of our darkest memories, and fear of storms has been, I'd say, a basic human preoccupation since we developed the capacity to think beyond the day after tomorrow.

Life in the Caribbean, especially in summer, is defined by a healthy respect for hurricanes – until one heads for whichever island you call home. Then respect turns to fear, and that fear grows in direct proportion to the force of the storm. When you are on a small vessel in the Caribbean, taking a direct hit from a hurricane becomes an immediate life or death struggle, and death usually wins with almost no effort on its part.

We were a hundred and ten miles NNE of Aruba when the first hurricane warnings were issued, and our warning was relayed by a passing US Navy guided missile frigate. The storm was, we were advised, well north of our track, but a second, more virulent storm had formed south of the Cape Verde Islands and looked like it would take a southerly track, perhaps end up hitting the Yucatan. Aruba and Curacao, we knew, were too far south of the usual track to be battered by direct hits, but the islands did occasionally get sideswiped by wind and storm surge, so we took the warning as simply that – the storm behind us became one more item on an increasingly long list of things to watch out for, but one that had the potential to rear it's head and swat us like a errant fly.

The southern Caribbean in the mid-1960s was nothing at all like it is today. There were no mega-cruise ships, and no 747s dropping off hundreds of divers per hour, and Aruba was as yet undiscovered by hordes of hippies seeking elicit stashes of Dutch hashish. The place was quiet, more a commercial hub than a tourist mecca, and we'd heard that – as one of the last vestiges of Holland's once great trading empire – it had an elusive, old world charm about it, and that's why we'd decided to make it our first port of call.

The island lies just off the Venezuelan coast, not at all far from the Gulf of Venezuela and Maracaibo. Beyond Maracaibo is a mountain range, the Cordillera de Merida, and these mountains, essentially the northernmost reaches of the Andes, go from sea level to over 12,000 feet in an unusually short span. In certain conditions, when strong low pressure gradients form offshore, winds rush off the Cordillera and out to sea. These winds often dance right past hurricane force, and they tend to hit Aruba, and often with dramatic effect.

My father came up into cockpit, his face scrunched up in a deepening scowl. "The Venezuelan Navy just put out a warning for hurricane force winds, out of the SOUTH," he said, emphasizing the unexpected direction. "Maracaibo just closed it's airport, and they're reporting 60 knot winds, with gusts over 90."

"Bearing and distance," my mother asked.

"Two-two-five true, two hundred nautical."

She looked to the southwest – and we all looked in that general direction – but all we could make out was an indistinct line of reddish brown haze along the far horizon.

"Call it two hours max 'til it gets here," my dad added. "Maybe an hour," and he looked at her long and carefully.

We had, literally, just passed the northwest tip of Curaçao, and mom looked over her left shoulder, then at dad. "How far to the entrance at Willemstad?" she asked.

"Twenty six," he said.

"And how far to San Nicolas?"

"Call it fifty two."

"Get ready to come about," she said gently, and Paul and I hopped to, got ready to re-trim the sails, and she threw the helm over, set her course for Willemstad, Curaçao, once dad passed it up. We started looking over the other shoulder now, not at the storms running in from the Atlantic, and it was an abject lesson in focusing so hard in one direction – while you forgot to look the other way.

Which was, of course, exactly what had been going on between Mary Ann and Jen. I'd been so focused on Jen causing trouble I never saw it coming. Mary Ann was having issues, it turned out. She was not happy. And not just with Jen.

She was unhappy with me.

Because I had, predictably I could easily see, been so concerned with Jen causing trouble I was paying a lot less attention to Mary Ann. You take women for granted at your peril, I think was the lesson learned, and the situation was ripe to blow up in my face once we hit Willemstad.

I think the other thing that bears repeating here is that we were, by and large, eighteen years old. I say by and large because there were times when my parents were acting eighteen, particularly when mother got grumpy and grabbed dad by the nuts and pulled him down to their bunk. Sara, too, was a little older, but she was the ancient among us, wise beyond her years. We, the real eighteen year olds, were getting kind of jealous of my parents and their nonstop sexathon, too, but that in no way diminished the existential angst Mary Ann apparently felt after just two nights at sea watching me and Jen.

Our first day out of Virgin Gorda had passed quietly enough, or so I thought, and while I'd kept an eye out on Jen I spent almost every waking moment, as I'd promised the night before, by Mary Ann's side – and it's impossible for me even now to describe how much I loved her that day. With her dark, Acadian beauty, she was an improbability to me – and by that I mean she was in every inch the exact opposite of my mother. Where my mother was willowy and off-puttingly athletic, Mary Ann was embracingly enveloping, often voluptuously so. Put another way, if my mother was an iced Pinot Grigio, Mary Ann was the noblest Cabernet you'd ever had, and she was definitely at her best when served at room temperature.

Looked at another, more relevant way, Mary Ann was the exact opposite of Jennifer, yet they did not attract one another. They repelled, and with exacting force, their gravities pushing each of us apart. We saw it that first day, too; we all felt the coming conflict. My mother watched it coming, my father looked and turned away. Paul shrugged and seemed to say 'I told you this would happen,' while poor Sara worked away in the galley or sat on the foredeck, picking away at a mandolin she'd brought along for the ride – watching and waiting.

We ate pear salad and little slices of prosciutto that first night, and drank red Kool-aid while we watched the sun set, and mom put Jen on watch with her and Paul so they stayed on deck while the rest of us cleaned up and hit the sack. It went well enough, I suppose, for the first half hour anyway, then Jen felt the first fluttery wings of mal-de-mer and was soon looking over the rail, feeding the fish – as the old saying goes. And she couldn't stop, either, so mom took pity on her, sent her below, and Mary Ann came up to take her place. I came up at midnight, and so did Dad and Sara, while they went below, but not an hour passed before Jen came up into the cockpit – and of course she tried to settle in by me. I grabbed a flashlight and went forward to check the sails for chafe – per mother's orders in the Log – and when I came aft she was cuddled up on my father's lap – snoring away. He looked at me and grinned, shrugged his shoulders and glanced at the compass before scanning the far horizon.

Jen was still there a half hour later, when mom came up into the cockpit. She looked at Jen, then at my father, then she went over and grabbed him by the nuts and pulled him below; Jen sat up, flustered and suddenly awake, while Sara groaned and said something colorful about the sexual appetites of old farts.

"What happened to your dad?" Jen asked.

"Raising the flag on Iwo Jima again," Sara sighed.

I shook my head, rubbed an eye with my middle finger.

"Oh," Jen said, then: "Again?"

"Hell hath no fury," Sara added, just for good measure, I assume.

"Huh?" Jen said, then she yawned and put her head down – this time in my lap.

And so, yes, of course Mary Ann came up a few minutes later. She looked at me, the wide-eyed boy with the cute blond's face plastered to his groin and she kind of grumbled, then went back to our berth. The door slammed hard, too, I seem to recall.

Dad came up a little while later, with mother trailing an inch behind, and she grabbed Jen by the short hairs and took her below for a chat, and two hours later, like two ships passing in the night I went below – as Mary Ann went topsides to stand the four to eight watch.

"Happy trails," I might have said in passing.

With a sixty two foot waterline, Sirius was a real greyhound. Close hauled, driving into the wind, she roared along making nine knots look easy, while off the wind and with acres of sail up she broke through eleven knots that second afternoon – and we were ecstatic as she arced through that gentle sea. Sara made some sort of Lebanese salad of cracked wheat, tomatoes and lemon, along with a vat of something called hummus, and we soon realized we were all going to get fat with her in the galley, yet we were, all in all, a happy lot. The miles cracked off with monotonous regularity and the sun felt good after ten years in Massachusetts, and I remember looking around at one point, thinking that this magic carpet was all mine. I was eighteen and owned a magic carpet!

Pride goeth before the fall, does it not? And, needless to say, some falls are bigger than others.

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Willemstad was, in the summer of 1965, almost quaint and certainly charming. The inner harbor was, of course, a swampy mix of industrial plant and oil refineries, yet the entrance canal was something to behold. Little dutch shops and houses, all decked out in their ornate rooflines and soothing pastels, had yet to be razed to make room for super-sized cruise ships, and we'd tied up alongside the Handelskade and cleared customs by mid-afternoon. My parents – along with the Paul/Sara train – pulled out of the station as soon as the parade of officialdom left, leaving me alone to wait for the Jen-Mary Ann express to pull in. I didn't have long to wait.

Mary Ann, duffel in hand, came out into the cockpit and without saying a word hopped ashore and walked off towards a sidewalk café – daring me, I assumed, to follow. So I hopped off, not realizing that two days at sea completely affects balance, and negatively. I managed a drunken, lopsided jog and caught up with her, grabbed her duffel and pulled her to a halt, then I just looked at her, wondering what to say.

"Well?"

"Don't do this to us," I said.

"Me? What about you? What have you done to us?"

"Nothing."

That was not the right thing to say, and she snorted, pulled her duffel out of my hand and resumed her onward journey. To the airport, I think, but she stopped at a café and put her bag down by a table and ordered coffee.

Then she flipped the bird at the boat, and turning, I saw Jen sitting there, smiling at me.

And the Doc's words came back once again, and this time they slammed into me like an out of control freight train. I turned to Mary Ann and walked to her, sat down at the table and recounted the entire conversation – the Doc's final lament about his wife and daughter – and she listened attentively, even compassionately, then she just shook her head.

"So, let me get this straight. He told you all that, and, presumably, you believed him? And she's curled up by you in the cockpit with her head on your lap? At two in the morning?"

"I was steering. She was snoring. What? Do you think she was giving me head?"

Once again, the wrong words at the wrong time. What can I say...it's a gift.

"Wow," she sighed. "Can I pick 'em, or what?" The look in her eyes was brutal, kind of like a hurricane warning received too late to make much difference. "Maybe you'd better get out of my sight, while we're still friends."

"You're leaving? You're really going to leave? Now?"

"You're not as dumb as you look, Spud."

"Well, I guess better to get this out of the way now, than wait for it to happen a few years from now."

"What?" she said, her voice now laced with contempt.

"If you're going to run away at the drop of a hat, it's better to get it over with now, don't you think? I mean, if that's the way it's going to be, why bother? I didn't do a goddamn thing, and if that's all it's going to take to set you off and run home? Well, the Hell with it – and the Hell with you!"

And I got up and walked back to Sirius; I hopped aboard and stormed past Jen on my way below, then slammed the door to my stateroom. I turned on the radio and tuned in some funky Calypso-Dutch-station and tried to close my eyes – just as the cat-fight-from-Hell started in earnest. Screaming – insults I'd never heard before – foul language I'd always associated with stories of seamen brawling with prostitutes – you name it...it went on for a few minutes – then – nothing.

Then angry footsteps on the companionway ladder, a sudden knock on my door.

"Go away," I said, my voice tired now.

"Did my father really say those things to you?" I heard Jen say.

I went to the door, opened it and looked into her eyes – and I did not say a word.

Yet she looked into mine. Then she saw the truth for herself, and she quietly fell away into a very dark place. Mary Ann was on the steps above, looking at the damage she'd inflicted, watching Jen implode – and guilt shook her, her healing nature took hold and she came down, grabbed Jen by the shoulders and pulled her close.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," Mary Ann sighed, but Jen was in full melt-down mode just then, and her's was not some pretend episode; no, this was a complete unraveling, the real deal, and I went to Jen and picked her up, carried her forward to her stateroom and laid her on the berth. I sat with her for hours, stroked her head, tried to help her through the storm – but this one had caught her without warning and laid waste to her soul.

Mary Ann came in a while later and brought us tea, then she sat on the bed and laid her head on my lap, and she held Jen's hand while I rubbed both their heads. My father poked his head in the door towards evening and asked to speak with me, and we tucked Jen in and both of went topsides. Mom and dad were waiting, of course, and Paul was too.

"What happened?" my father asked, and Mary Ann told the tale, ran through the sequence of events.

"How is she now," my mother asked.

"Catatonic," Mary Ann said.

"Time for Jack Daniels," mother said, and she went below, got a bottle and poured a glass, then went to Jen's room.

"Have you had anything to eat?" Dad asked.

We both shook our heads.

"Sara found a surreal place a few blocks away. She's waiting for us."

"What about Mom? Shouldn't we..."

"Nope. Just leave her to it – she knows what to do."

Mary Ann, now grief-stricken, her head down as we walked along, took my hand – and I put my arm around her, kissed the top of her head – and I could feel Paul as he walked ahead, shaking his head, seething. I didn't need to hear his 'I told you so' – it was unnecessary now, anyway – yet I knew it was coming.

We ate in silence, and the only thing on my mind was how to make this work before everyone got up and left. Jen had as much, if not more right to be here than anyone, yet she was, true to the Doc's word, simply incapable of not stirring the pot. And I was, apparently, so afraid of offending anyone that I'd become incapable of setting boundaries. Of course as soon as I thought that, I saw Dad sitting by the wheel with Jen's head in his lap – and as soon as that image faded I heard echoes of Paul chastising me for trying to blame my issues on other people's presumed faults.

So yeah, this was my problem, or more accurately a problem of my own creation – so I had to fix it. The obvious solution was to toss Jen off the boat, fly her to Texas and let her get on with destroying someone else's life, yet I heard a little voice somewhere in the gray matter, an echo, really, of the most perplexing words I'd ever heard.

"...take care of her as best you can..."

There was an implied promise, of sorts, in my taking Sirius. A promise to take care of her, as best I could. Sirius, of course, but Jen as well, yet how could I do both and be true to Mary Ann at the same time – let alone my tacit promise to the doc.

The easy answer, of course, was I'd created an impossible problem – so I had to fix it. If you assume, as I did, that flying was my life, that conferred a certain way of looking at the world. Simply put, if flying an airplane had taught me anything at all it's that you can't quit working the problem. When you're up there and shit hits the fan, you've got to fly the airplane and work the problem at the same time – and quitting isn't an option – unless you want to go down in flames. Dad had drilled that into my head since I was old enough to reach the rudder pedals, so the concept was second nature to me now – and I saw Jen and Mary Ann in the same light: I had to work the problem – now, not tomorrow – or we would all go down in flames. And – I had to keep the three of us together, somehow, and yet keep us from tearing each other apart.

Of course, my mother had seen that coming as soon as Jen showed up.

And she was busy fixing the problem the only way she knew how, but that wasn't going to let me off the hook. Not by a long shot.

When we got up to leave, to walk back down to the water's edge, Sara asked me to hang back for a moment, and after everyone was out on the sidewalk she leaned close.

"Maybe it's time to face the music," she said, hesitating, not knowing the limits of our friendship yet, "because it was all I could do to keep Paul from taking off today, going home. He's pissed, Spud. You can't ignore problems like Jen, hope they'll just go away. They don't, and she won't. They just fester, get worse, create newer and bigger problems."

I nodded my head.

"So, what are you going to do?"

"Take care of the problem."

She laughed, a little, anyway, then she shook her head. "You need to grow up, Spud, before you find yourself making the same mistakes over and over again." Then she walked out and joined Paul, leaving me standing there – with one foot still in my mouth, the other firmly up my ass.

When we got back to Sirius mother was still in Jen's stateroom, and they were both passed out – naked as the day they were born. Comatose, I think, was a good descriptive, and there was an empty bottle of Jack Daniels on the foot of the berth. They were holding on to one another, snoring open-mouthed like a couple of drunk sailors, and Jen's face was resting on my mother's bare breast. Dad poked his head in and looked at the scene, then started whistling that ditty from The High and The Mighty. By now you should understand that when he whistled that particular tune he was mightily impressed. Then Paul stopped and looked at the scene, and his eyes went round as tea saucers – so of course Sara had to come take a look. She too poked her head in and she too looked at my mom and Jen, yet she came out giggling – until she could get up on deck. They she was rolling around on deck, laughing her ass off.

Father of course went for his Leica, and some time later 5x7 glossies were posted over the chart table. Neither Jen nor my mother claimed any memory of the event, yet after that we had peace and quiet onboard Sirius. Mother still drained Dad's nuts two or three times a day, but in Jennifer my mother had finally found a kindred spirit. Lest you think something inordinately perverted was going on, I had my doubts then, and still do. We rarely saw them together after that evening, and what we did observe was more often than not platonic, but I couldn't help seeing a sly little gleam in father's eyes when he saw them, or when he looked at those pictures. I think he had great plans for the three of them; I just hoped I'd never find out if it happened.